


Sacrifice

by thedevilchicken



Category: Genghis Khan - Miike Snow (Music Video)
Genre: Backstory, Developing Relationship, M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Spies & Secret Agents, Torture, Villains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 06:22:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8879347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Over the years, it almost started to feel like they were friends.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [duckbunny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckbunny/gifts).



Over the years, after the third or the fourth or maybe the fifth time that had Alexis foiled one of Erik's fiendish plans, it started to feel almost like they were friends. 

Of course, Alexis Cavendish is hardly sentimental - he would hardly have been the agent he was then or have lasted so long had he been brimming with kindness and compassion for his fellow man. He'd have been shot in the head the very first time that he hesitated. Friendships would have been exploited. 

Alexis Cavendish doesn't hesitate and he never has. He doesn't cultivate friendships and he never has. But, over the years, it became apparent that he didn't quite think of Erik von Nordheim as being his enemy. 

\---

Naturally, it started out that way, or close to it. 

The first time that Alexis foiled one of Erik's fiendish plans, Erik shot at him as he made his daring, dashing getaway. He missed, but Alexis had just broken Erik's hand in a rather large steel door and so under the circumstances he could hardly have been blamed for missing his target. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Kordavian army then, albeit already in charge of their highly active research division, so his aim was usually to be counted on as perfect. The Kordavians were renowned for their exceptionally thorough training and Erik von Nordheim had risen up above so many others, so that clearly had to mean something. Their commanders were famously intelligent, resourceful and well versed in their technological advancements, and Erik had risen up quite quickly, in their vast Baltic nation where their military rule was almost paradoxically fair but absolute. And, even for a Kordavian, Erik had a reputation. That had to mean something, too. 

The bullet ricocheted off said rather large steel door and nicked Alexis's shoulder, but, as he fled the scene with Kordavian guards hot on his heels and Erik's curses echoing after them down the impressively acoustic corridor, he had to admit that he was irked to a greater extent by the tear in his well-tailored suit than by the one in his skin underneath it. He'd been shot before in his twenty-seven years, in the four years he'd been with MI6 and the five with the RAF before that. He'd been shot before and a great deal more seriously. But, at least back then, he didn't doubt that Erik would have killed him without a second's hesitation had he just been able to. Back then, they didn't know each other. They were on opposite sides, and that was all that mattered to them.

The second time, it was Alexis that shot at Erik. He meant to kill him, too, except whatever substance it was that the Kordavian secret police had mixed into his coq au vin had started to kick in with alarming gusto and so his aim was ever so slightly off. They were in Paris at the time, in the high-class restaurant of one of the more upscale hotels, and Alexis had just successfully ensured that Erik's latest sale of Kordavian-made weapons to the Middle East had been entirely unsuccessful. Had he been in his right mind and not drugged by winey chicken, he might not have shot at him and sent the entire restaurant into utter, shrieking chaos. But if he'd been in his right mind, of course, he wouldn't have missed and hit the chandelier in a gigantic hail of crystal, and Erik wouldn't have looked so amused - just faintly, a twist to his lips and a sparkle to his eye, but amused nonetheless - as he made his getaway.

The third time was in London and the fourth in Monte Carlo, after Erik was promoted to full colonel on the back of a deal that one of Alexis's MI6 colleagues had utterly failed to prevent, much to his shame. The fifth was a riverboat cruise in Egypt, like an Agatha Christie book he'd read once on a plane except with spies instead of murderers (the distinction was small but apparent, at least to him) and the sixth a cello solo in a Montreal concert hall with the deal going down in a dressing room backstage. The cellist didn't seem pleased to lose his hundred thousand pound cello in the process, but it _did_ have a stolen formula for new biological weapon hidden inside the case. Alexis thinks MI6 him a new one. A new old one. Apparently, it was an Amati.

But then: he was sent to a trade conference in Basel for evidence of an illegal arms sale that had no discernible Kordavian link at all. And, afterwards, as he made his way through the hotel foyer toward the taxi rank outside, Erik turned out of the restaurant and they were face to face for the first time in months. They practically walked into each other; Alexis rather suspects Erik's bodyguards wouldn't have liked that and a fist-fight would have ensued, so he's rather glad they managed to step apart in the nick of time.

"Alexis Cavendish," Erik said, surprised. "Of course. I thought this conference had been too quiet to be true."

Alexis smiled wryly as Erik's guards' hands inched toward their jackets. He held his hands wide, bag in one and the other empty, his jacket pulling apart just far enough for them to see he wasn't armed, at least not visibly.

"You know I hate to disappoint you, Colonel," he replied, as the bodyguards eased off a fraction, "but I'm afraid it's going to have to _stay_ quiet. I'm not actually here for you this time."

Erik frowned at him, at least moderately confused by his response, and Alexis had to admit that he understood why that was quite clearly: he hadn't reached for a gun, he hadn't walked away without a word in response, he hadn't even acted like they'd never met and given any one of his fifty unfamiliar false names by way of (extremely limited) proof. He'd answered to Alexis Cavendish. He'd more or less - admittedly less - agreed he was a spy, _that_ spy, the one who'd been making such a nuisance of himself to the Kordavian nation. He didn't take it back, though, even once he realised exactly what he'd done. He didn't try to cover his little mistake. He stood his ground and Erik nodded, a decision apparently made. 

"Let me buy you a drink, Mr Cavendish," he said, evenly, seemingly quite reasonably. 

"Call me Alexis," Alexis replied. "Don't you think we've known each other long enough by now for Christian names?"

Erik came very close to smiling, just around the corners of his mouth. "Let me buy you a drink, _Alexis_."

He almost said yes just to see what might happen but in the end, after a pause, he politely declined - after all, he had a plane to catch and heads would roll if he missed it. They shook hands. He left and Erik moved on. Neither one tried to kill the other. 

It was almost like they were friends, or at least on friendly terms. He had to remind himself that they weren't. 

\---

The next time they met, it surprisingly wasn't about Kordavia either. 

Alexis was there in Vienna to steal blueprints for some kind of secret Russian superweapon and he managed it on the second attempt, during his third night in the rather vast hotel. It was a triumph in planning except that he was discovered and so perhaps _triumph_ was too strong a term; he was chased down the hotel's eighth floor corridor and he ran - quite literally - straight into Colonel Erik von Nordheim as he turned a corner at quite considerable speed. 

"Go back inside," Alexis said, half out of breath and perhaps unattractively red in the face, as he grasped Erik rather abruptly by the shoulders. "I'm being followed. He'll shoot to kill and ask questions later." 

But instead of retreating back into his room, Erik seemed to take just a moment to assess the situation and, of course, his own place within it. Then he reached one hand into Alexis's open jacket and pulled out his silenced pistol from within. When the Russian turned the corner at full pelt soon after that, Erik took aim and he quite calmly pulled the trigger; he shot the Russian in the chest and they both watched him fall down at their feet with an expression of utter mute surprise. 

Alexis gaped in much the same way, though with the advantage of being more more still living. Erik handed him back the gun, though it would have been nothing for him to shoot him too and remove the meddlesome MI6 agent just as he had the Russian. 

"Go," Erik said. "He's unlikely to be alone. Allow me to take care of this."

So he went. He didn't argue, he didn't ask why, and at that precise moment it honestly seemed he really didn't need to. As he stepped into the elevator, the last thing he saw was two Kordavian guards pulling the big dead Russian into Erik's hotel suite and closing the door behind them before anyone could see. He escaped to his own room and no one came knocking on his door at all that night, though he stayed up waiting in the dark, alert and dare he say slightly confused. He had what he'd been sent for, mission accomplished, though the plan had taken an extremely unexpected turn. What exactly a Kordavian official had thought he was doing assisting MI6 rather eluded him; all he could be sure of was it was _not_ a prelude to defection. Erik von Nordheim was not the type. Erik von Nordheim had saved his life.

He left Austria in the morning and went home with the blueprints intact. Three weeks later, in Helsinki, he didn't say no when Erik offered him a drink; when he told him what he'd learned of the CIA's most recent plans to send a mole into Kordavia, it was really only fair that he did so. 

\---

He was caught red-handed eight months later, inside the Russian embassy in Kordavia. 

The guard twisted his arm up tight behind his back, almost to the point of breaking. He'd had broken bones before and had to admit he didn't particularly relish the promise of another, but he'd had far worse in the line of duty and had done much worse, too, quite resolutely. He just hoped the next step wasn't the end of that duty with a shot to the base of his skull, and mercifully he heard footsteps approaching their position down the corridor. Any momentary distraction could only work in his favour.

"What seems to be the problem here?" Erik asked, in seamless Russian; perhaps Alexis couldn't turn his head but he could recognise the voice quite easily enough, even if he'd never heard it speaking Russian before that evening. 

"I caught him with the ambassador's files," the guard replied, flustered. "In the office. Stealing."

Alexis found himself wrenched hard to his left, toward the origin of the voice, as if this somehow demonstrated his guilt more readily than any proof could. Erik was in full uniform, clearly there for the reception, and gave him a look that said nothing quite so clearly as _are you here for me, Alexis?_ If he had been, as he had been four months earlier, as he had been so many times before that over the previous few years, he wondered if Erik would have walked away and let the Russians have him - they'd have killed him if he had, though perhaps there would have been torture first. He wondered if he would have known somehow if he'd lied to him to save himself from that. As it was, he was there for the Russians and not Kordavia, so he didn't have to chance the lie and find that out - he shook his head just slightly, no. Erik understood.

"That's impossible," Erik said. "This man is here as my guest."

"But he--"

"You're mistaken."

"But--"

"Do you know who I am?" Alexis could almost feel the guard bristle and cower at the precise same moment. He clearly knew who Erik was: he was an officer of the Kordavian Army, the most famous of their officers, the face of their armed forces, their newly promoted general. He had a reputation, and the guard knew that he'd earned it. 

"Leave us," Erik said, his tone admittedly quite commanding even to Alexis's trained ears, and so the guard unsurprisingly did just as he was told. They watched him go, and then they turned to each other. 

"That was dangerous," Alexis said. "You know he'll go straight to his superiors." 

Erik raised his brows as he tucked his hands behind his back. "When the ambassador informs me that I've vouched for an operative of MI6, I'll tell him you were working for me," he said. He held out one hand toward him, the other still behind his back. "Give me what you took. I'll say it's my usual practice to get to know my business partners before we sign a contract. I'll use what you came here for to drive down the price of our deal and they'll never suspect a thing."

Alexis weighed his options and found quite quickly that he had none - none except the option he'd been given, or else torture and then almost certain death, so practically speaking no option at all. He gave the microfiche from his breast pocked to Erik, pressed it into his palm, and for a second Erik rested his free hand on top of both of theirs, closed it, squeezed, the pad of his thumb at the inside of Alexis's wrist, warm and perhaps deliberate. Then he turned and left. Alexis didn't stay to watch him go, but only because he couldn't afford the time.

When Alexis stepped onto his plane back to England, he wasn't sure if he'd just been saved or just been conned. When the microfiche arrived at the front door of his London flat the next morning, handed over to him by a courier whose accent had a suspiciously Kordavian twang to it, he still wasn't sure even then. After all, either way, Erik had got what he'd wanted. 

All he could say for sure was that what he'd said had been right: what Erik had done was dangerous. He'd taken a risk. He'd put his own life in danger. 

Maybe, Alexis thought, that thought vibrant and insidious, Erik had done that for him. 

\---

The first time he fell in love, Erik killed her. 

He did it himself, at least; he didn't delegate the dirty work to one of his gun-toting bodyguards or his league of hidden, hired assassins, didn't leave her to his henchmen and all that may well have entailed. He made it quick, by all accounts, not even just a little torture, and Alexis appreciated that fact at the very least. She'd been an agent, after all, caught in a thoroughly undeniable act of espionage on foreign soil, and so she could have expected the end to be much, much worse. Alexis had to wonder if it had all just been coincidence, or something more.

The second time he fell in love, against all reason and his better judgement, Erik killed him, too. He did it himself just as he had the first time, but by all accounts it wasn't even close to quick. The body was never found, of course, but when he saw Erik's hands at a British governmental function there in London more than two weeks later, they were still so bruised that he could barely make a fist. He wondered if he'd even asked a single question. He wondered what that death had really been about. He suspected, sickly, rousingly, but had no sources he could ask - he'd felt he and Erik were almost friends, but did he really hate him?

When Erik married, quite naturally the thought occurred to Alexis that he might quite like to kill his lovely wife. He planned it, how he'd do it, where, the circumstances, twenty different ways for her to die depending on when and where he chose to do it. It should have made him sick, he supposed, considering his line of work, given that his agency's function was, in a way, to save lives and it wasn't as if he could argue that Rebecca von Nordheim was, in fact, strictly speaking, the enemy. Of course, Alexis Cavendish had never exactly been brimming with kindness and compassion for his fellow man. He'd always know that it took a certain kind of person to do the kind of work he did and so it didn't make him sick. He thought about the look on Erik's face, and he smiled, and he planned. He didn't feel sick; he felt excited.

He had a great many plans. They were excellent plans, thorough plans, virtually untraceable plans though he knew that Erik would know it was him and that was, after all, the point of the exercise. Erik went to Milan with Rebecca in the party to sign some manner of international trade deal, and Alexis had a way in, saw his opportunity quite clearly. Except then he saw the happy couple there across the ballroom, six months into marriage. 

Erik was miserable, so Alexis left his wife alive and he went back home to London. After that, he called it even. Leaving her alive was his revenge. 

And in the shower, at home, behind closed doors with cock in hand, it wasn't his dead lovers that he thought about - it was the man who'd killed them, the wretched man who'd lit up wholly in that ballroom when he'd spotted Alexis Cavendish standing there across the room. He understood. Erik didn't hate him. It was something far more unexpected.

It wasn't his dead lovers he thought of as he touched himself in bed that night - it was the man who'd killed them. After that, it always was.

\---

They met after that, over the years, as twenty-seven became thirty, thirty-one, thirty-three, thirty-five. 

They met all over the world, wherever their respective trades conspired to taken them, though it was always by chance and never by design unless Alexis found himself under orders to work specifically against him. Those times it wasn't directed against Kordavia, he told himself that MI6 hadn't sent him for Erik von Nordheim. Those times, he told himself that his superiors wouldn't see the harm in drinks and dinners and notes in matchbooks or crosswords in newspapers on room service trolleys. He didn't report how many times he saved Erik's life, either himself live and in person or via the passing of intelligence. He didn't report how many times it was that Erik saved his life in return. 

Erik wasn't an attractive man, at least not in the conventional sense. He was bald and a fraction short and his teeth weren't straight, and then there was the fact that MI6 had him pegged as an evil villain bent on world domination. Honestly, over the years, Alexis never saw world domination as being at the top of Erik's list; he seemed content enough with his military position, doing his duty for his country, going home to Kordavia once his ambassadorial work was complete. His plans weren't even particularly fiendish, he thought, just well-made and contrary to most prominent British interests, though perhaps he did unpleasant things from time to time in the commissioning of them. But everyone Alexis knew, individually and as whole nations, did near-comparable unpleasant things - Kordavia was hardly alone in that, and Alexis himself was the proof.

Erik wasn't a good man, either, at least not in the conventional sense. He got his hands dirty. He did the hard jobs, the ones no one else could when it came down to it, and sometimes, when they met, he looked exhausted underneath it all. They'd have drinks in hotel bars under Kordavian surveillance and they'd talk, underneath their breath between the chit-chat of small talk. Alexis understood. Perhaps Erik wasn't a good man, but he was a better man than Alexis was: sometimes, the things he did for duty weighed on him. In any other man, Alexis might have found that weak. In Erik, it seemed perversely endearing.

The attack was on the news one afternoon, and Alexis heard it on the radio while he was cooking in his flat. He went straight to the airport in a cab with a half-packed bag in one hand, in such a hurry that he had to call a neighbour from a phone box on the way just to make sure he hadn't left an omelette burning on the hob. When he bought his ticket, he realised he'd been in such a hurry that he'd brought along his own passport and not one of his many convincing fakes. He should have turned back then, once he'd realised, but he boarded the flight despite it, wondering what might happen, not sure why he'd decided to put things to the test. He wasn't stopped as he boarded the flight. He wasn't stopped when he disembarked. Erik had never had him blacklisted.

Several hours later, past dark in Kordavia, he slipped into the hospital and into Erik's room. The dressing on his face was tinged pink-red from what was underneath. There wasn't much of a shape there in it in the place where his nose should have been. 

"Who did this?" he asked, when Erik woke, his stomach still lurching, sinking, twisting, turning. 

"Valentin," Erik replied, no coercion needed. His voice thick from the medication that steadily trickled through his IV. "Do you know Valentin? Tight-lipped. Tall and balding. KGB."

"I know Valentin," Alexis confirmed, with a stiff nod. "I didn't know the KGB had an interest." 

"It seems they have. The irony is, I have no idea why they would in this particular instance."

Alexis said nothing about all their dead KGB agents. He said nothing about General von Nordheim's dinners with Alexis Cavendish of MI6 and that the Russians weren't so blockheaded that they couldn't dig a little deeper to find out an iota of the truth, even just one truth out of many about the things they'd done for one another. 

"You know, it's just not the same with other agents as it is with you," Erik said, his eyes closing, drifting, and Alexis chuckled at that, surprised. 

"Well it wouldn't bloody well be, would it," he replied, and Erik smiled just fractionally, though it looked like even that much hurt him. Alexis reached over and squeezed his arm and Erik glanced at him just for a moment, looking right at him before he closed his eyes again.

Erik was right, of course: it wasn't the same with any other target for Alexis, either. It was like a game between them, first and foremost, where no one else knew the rules, like a dance only they knew the steps to so everyone else just got hopelessly lost. It was almost like they were friends, opponents, partners, lovers, enemies, all rolled into one, and nothing and no one else would do. That was why he was there and that was, he knew, why he'd do what he had to do next. 

Once Erik had drifted off again into a drug-assisted sleep, he left. A fortnight later, he caught up with Valentin in Rome. 

He tied Valentin to a chair and as he peeled every inch of the skin from his face he told him, _That's for what you did to Erik_. He didn't live for very long afterwards, but Alexis was sure that when he died, he understood why it happened.

\---

Twenty-seven years of age and the day he'd first met Erik von Nordheim were very much the dim and distant past when the Kordavians finally caught him in the act. He was forty-one years old by then and maybe finally too slow to outrun an army of well-trained military guards, even if his paragliding from the nearest cliff face to rendez-vous with the middleman's sea plane that was waiting below would have been its usual study in perfection. He's always been very good at his job.

They took him to the interrogation room at gunpoint and in chains and sat him down on a chilly metal chair to wait. There was a bloodstain on the concrete and he looked at it, scuffed at it with the toe of one shoe, wondering if it was just for show but where the Kordavians were concerned - where Erik was concerned - the truth of it could have been anything. Maybe it was all that was left of one of Alexis's many lovers. Maybe it was red food dye splashed there just for effect. 

"I told you to have that cleaned," Erik told the guard when he finally entered, and they both spent the next twenty minutes watching a burly henchman scrub blood off the floor before they even began in earnest. 

"Did you ever think you'd catch me?" Alexis asked, as the guard ferried the mop bucket out of the room and left the air smelling sharply of cleaning fluid.

"No," Erik replied, "but I've thought about it," and the unexpected fact that he'd answered so damned honestly seemed to shake them both. Erik turned away to hide it. Alexis couldn't turn away. He didn't think he would have if he could.

Erik injected him with something that made his limbs feel heavy, in great enough quantity that he couldn't have overpowered him if he'd wanted to. It felt like he was falling down and down and down although he didn't move a muscle from the steel chair he'd been placed on and Erik cuffed his hands to the arms of it, cuffed his ankles to the legs of it and ran a strap around his chest that had less to do with any form of physical restraint than it had with keeping his drugged body firmly upright. Erik loomed in front of him and when he put his hand on his chest over the pleats in his shirt, it was like he pushed him down even lower. Erik's eyes seemed huge as dinner plates as the light reflected from his ridiculous gold nose and Alexis wanted to laugh but he couldn't make a sound, not one, not anything, just a laboured breath. All that he could do was stare. 

Erik slapped him. He slapped him hard enough across the face that it split the inside of his cheek against his teeth and blood dripped down his chin that Erik wiped away with his thumbs, assiduously, hovering close, though Alexis suspected that it left an unsightly smear. Erik twisted his fingers into Alexis's hair and he pulled back his head, he stretched out his neck, he looked like he'd have liked to have torn out his throat with just his bare teeth and Alexis shivered at that look. His chest tightened. His head swam and reeled and turned and fell. 

There was a tray table that Erik dragged across the room with a shriek of metal across concrete and a jangle of its metal instruments that echoed for a while in Alexis's ears, but the scalpels and the pliers and the cutters and the probes didn't worry him. Erik's usually neat, clean hands did. He had blood under his nails. Maybe it was his.

"Tell me everything," Erik said, close, his skin radiating heat in that freezing room that made Alexis feel sick and warm and disingenuously hopeful. And he could have resisted, he thought, but in that moment he truly didn't see the point in doing so.

"Tell me everything, Alexis," Erik said, and so he did, but maybe it wasn't quite the everything that he'd expected. He told him that he'd volunteered for this most recent MI6 excursion to Kordavia. He told him that on his four, six, eight previous assignments, he'd hoped that he'd run into him and he'd been disappointed that he hadn't. He told him about seducing other agents and wondering, in bed, after, before, during, if Erik would want to kill them, too, like he'd done before, if the fact he'd screwed them was the reason why. He told him about lying to his superiors about outside involvement in his more intrepid escapes and going home to his flat to touch himself while he wondered if maybe, just maybe, Erik was listening when he did it, if maybe, just maybe, Erik was doing the same at the same time. He told him he'd never searched his flat for listening devices. He hadn't been sure he'd wanted to find proof either way. He'd wanted to know but he hadn't.

"Did you ever?" Alexis asked, trying to ignore the painful way that his ridiculous erection strained against his trousers. The drug in him seemed to make everything hurt, but he had a feeling there'd be more to come so if that was the extent of it then he'd got off lightly. "Erik, did you ever?"

Erik's expression was half confused and half aghast and maybe half stricken except that was more like thirds and nothing made much sense when he thought about it. Erik was grimacing with his teeth bared. He had the fingers of both hands twisted tight into Alexis's hair, his bloody fingernails scraping at his scalp. 

"Did I ever?" he said, looking horrified, disgusted. His fingers pulled tighter and it hurt, it hurt, but Alexis frankly didn't give a damn. Erik leaned so close that he could feel his breath on his neck and the heat of his skin. 

"Always, Alexis," he said, strangled, strained, and ran one hand down hard between Alexis's thighs. He squeezed him, made him gasp with it, pain, pleasure, either, both. "Did I ever? _Always_."

He rested his forehead down against Alexis's just for a moment as he fell and fell and fell, one of Erik's hands at his clothed cock and the other in his hair. Alexis's heart hammered. His blood raced like it was in a bizarre hurry to spill. And when Erik turned and walked away and left him there, Alexis knew with perfect, certain clarity that Erik would have to kill him after this. It was the end he'd always expected. It wasn't a surprise. 

The surprise was that he didn't. 

\---

"Who did this?" Erik asked him the next time they met, his fingers tracing a long-healed bullet wound up by his shoulder. 

They were in a Berlin hotel room, naked, in lamplight. Alexis had free-climbed up three floors to the balcony to let himself in so that they wouldn't be found out and he'd found Erik waiting, still in his uniform, like the morality of the situation bothered him even when they took off their clothes, though he'd already told Rebecca in no uncertain terms that they had to separate. After Erik had let him go, after had Alexis stayed, that was the deal: they had to wait until he'd told her, at the very least. 

"Who did this?" Erik asked him, while Alexis was still above him and still in him, after, both of them rather breathless and very much still skin to skin. A sheen of sweat made Erik's his fingers slip against the scar but Alexis still knew which one it was. He remembered all of them, how he got them and who put them there.

He told him the name. Three days later, the shooter was dead. 

"Who did this?" Erik asked him, rubbing the jagged scar left by a broken glass bottle at his ribs. 

It was six weeks later by then, in Alexis's flat in London while Erik was there selling arms or whatever else his country needed from him. They weren't being coy any longer by that point, had practically telegraphed it to the diplomatic community at large: it was perhaps an open secret that General von Nordheim of Kordavia's new partner was with MI6, but he had a new identity they'd given him despite that. He was a Kordavian translator, one of very few on staff with their government, with impeccable credentials should anyone look into them because most of them were true. They called him Alexis Rutherford. The name didn't really change a thing.

"Who did this?" Erik asked him, still above him and still in him, still hard, still during, still fucking him. Alexis grasped at Erik's biceps and wrapped his legs around his waist. They'd swept the place for listening devices because by then, Alexis cared who heard the things he did.

He told him the name. A week after that, the stabber was dead, too. 

It went on like that for a year. More than a year, perhaps, but not by much because Alexis didn't have scars in great enough number to sustain it any longer. Some nights it was pyjamas and reading in bed in their home in Kordavia and some nights Erik stripped him naked and pushed him down against the mattress and did all the things Alexis had ever hoped he might. Sometimes he pressed his mouth to a scar and asked who'd done it, until the only one they hadn't talked about had been left by a ricochet that had torn Alexis's best suit, once upon a time. He gave up the names until the only one left living who'd scarred him was Erik. He could have lied and rid MI6 of thirty, forty top enemy agents, their biggest threats to national security, but he didn't lie. Not even once. It made a pleasant change, he thought. Erik seemed to appreciated it.

Over the years, after the third or the fourth or maybe the fifth time that Alexis had foiled yet another of Erik's fiendish plans, it had started to feel almost like they were friends, although his superiors had liked to call them nemeses. But they've never been friends any more than they've really been enemies - that's just their countries, beneath their thin diplomatic veneer. Erik hates diplomacy but since the divorce and with Alexis at his side, he's seemed to find it more appealing. From here Alexis stands, diplomacy is just spying by any other name.

MI6 are on tenterhooks for his next intelligence report. They think his insertion into Kordavia is his greatest achievement and his greatest sacrifice, and Alexis knows where his loyalties lie; he made up his mind about that a long time ago, because he knows what loyalty really is.

Erik kisses him goodnight and they turn off the lights. Their fingers twine together underneath the sheets and Alexis smiles to himself, just to himself because there's no one else to see it. 

Whatever else it is, this is not a sacrifice.


End file.
